As Prime Minister

This is a list of things I would do as Prime Minister if I had the ambition and energy to form my own party and the luck to actually form a majority government. Think of it as a newer, better and much, much shorter version of part 2 of my book. Many of the ideas in this list are completely outside the realm of possibility offered by our current parties and that is one reason I don’t like voting Liberal or NDP. They do not speak to me.

The list is roughly organized so I recommend browsing the whole thing to find areas you’re interested in.

Note: This is a list I keep on my website and I have not made any changes in response to Trump’s verbal and economic assaults on our country. Generally, I do not care about foreign policy when I am thinking about how to make Canada better. Suffice it to say, I would have more of a Doug Ford-type response to Trump than a Trudeau-esque response. (I do appreciate Carney demanding Trump shut up before he negotiates. That should be a prerequisite.)

When I was a teenager I was encouraged to participate in the As Prime Minister essay contest. (Since turned into a TV show, Canada’s Next Great Prime Minister.)

I didn’t participate because I was lazy. But it’s a good thing I didn’t participate because I was a fascist and I wanted to draft the homeless. (Seriously.)

Later, when I was a recovering libertarian, I wrote a book about how to fix Canada’s system of government.

Since then I’ve often mused about what I would do if I could convince some party to put me in charge and our party could somehow win a majority.

(Both things are so unlikely as to be beyond the realm of possibility: I am not charismatic enough, nor amoral enough, to run for office. And I could never convince someone charismatic enough that they should implement my policy ideas.)

But the internet lets me tell you what I think. Given my disappointment with the government’s response to the economic consequences of the pandemic, and some other things I have a bugbear about, I’ve decided to publish what I would do. I have updated this in part because my views have evolved over the last few years. (Certainly I have significantly different ideas now than I did in my book.)

Welfare State Reform

The form of liberal democracy we have in The West is commonly known as “the welfare state.” It’s a form of government pioneered by Germany and other western European countries in the late 19th century to deal with the dislocations of industrialization. Before industrialization, poverty was less visible and localized and income inequality was somewhat less extreme. The Welfare State, as a series of programs dealing with the poor, was a supposed solution to more poor people in greater concentrations in cities, provided by taxing those better off.

I think the welfare state model has failed. I think it has failed because it has failed to end poverty but also, more crucially, it has never even come close to ending homelessness.

I think the welfare state model should be replaced with something very simple:

Universal Basic Income (UBI)

I have already written about UBI during the pandemic. (And written every MP and Senator in Canada.)

Universal basic income means the government pays every resident citizen a monthly salary to provide for some level of basic needs (housing, food).

UBI solves many of the problems of the modern welfare state – when administration and enforcement are mostly eliminated, the costs of the programs, aside from the actual money sent to citizens, basically disappear. Everyone already has a Social Insurance Number. It would be pretty easy to just assign bank accounts to these and send money. We basically do this already with tax rebates.

Moreover, the emotional and psychological problems of welfare disappear when everyone gets the money. UBI tests have been mostly positive, with marked increases in emotional well-being.

Click the above link to see the more detailed argument I made during the pandemic. I have additional thoughts since then:

• UBI must be confined to residents of Canada (citizens living outside of Canada are not eligible)

• UBI might have to be confined to citizens of Canada as political support for UBI for permanent residents is likely to be very, very low.

For restricting UBI to resident citizens, I propose a similar rule to the one the US and Canadian border services use to determine whether Canadian snowbirds and American expats are spending too much time in the other country:

• If you are outside of Canada for more than 3 months in a row your UBI payments cease and you must apply to have them reinstated

• If you are outside of Canada for 3 months (non consecutively) in a single year, then if you are outside of Canada for 2 months in a row in the following year, then your UBI payments cease and you must apply to have them reinstated

• If you are outside of Canada for 3 months (non consecutively) in year one, 2 months (non consecutively) in year 2 and one month in a row in year 3, your UBI payments case and you must apply to have them reinstated.

This is a problem for two reasons: there is administration, which we are trying to avoid, and we need exit visas. Exit visas likely strike many as a huge infringement on individual rights but a) many countries have them (including the US!) and b) the government already knows all this anyway because we’ve accepted the surveillance state.

I know of three objections to UBI:

• People must deserve welfare

• People on UBI will spend their money on bad things

• UBI will cause inflation.

The first two are moral judgments. The first one is absurd on its face and a relic of monotheistic moralistic thinking that belongs in another time. We shouldn’t let our stupid beliefs get in the way of helping people.

The second objection is only valid if that’s what happens when we switch to UBI. There have been a number of UBI or similar experiments and, to the best of my knowledge, none have increased alcoholism or drug addiction. However, if a significant increase in drug/alcohol abuse occurs, or everyone just gambles it away, we can end UBI. (I am very skeptical that this will happen, but I cannot predict the future.) My argument against this is simply that welfare fails to solve the problem it is supposed to solve so we should try something else. If UBI fails because everyone is staying home and doing drugs, then we will need a new system. Until then, I don’t see why this objection is compelling; it’s just status quo bias.

The last objection to UBI – that it will cause inflation so bad that it will harm the economy – is the only criticism I am aware of that is an actual legitimate criticism. I am not an economist so all I can say is that UBI does not introduce more money into the economy, it just redistributes it differently than before. Why would this cause more inflation than the welfare state?

It may well. Look what happened in the US with the benefit cheques. And the recent electoral results around the world due to very limited inflation caused by government spending strongly argue that UBI will cause enough inflation to be unpopular. That was in addition to other government spending though. I want to stress that I do not think governments need borrow excessively to fund UBI but I could be wrong about that. I am proposing drastically cutting or eliminating other forms of government spending - giving money directly to people instead of to organizations.

UBI Reparations

As part of the UBI program, I’d double the monthly payment for anyone alive holding an Indian Status card at the date of the bill being signed into law and anyone born to two status card-carrying parents within 8 months (so conceived before the law was passed). This would be a one-time act. Anyone born after the 8 month period would not be eligible. This is a small step to addressing what happened to the indigenous peoples of Canada.

Financing/Revenue

In order to fund UBI, two things need to happen:

• An end to (nearly) all individual tax credits and corporate subsidies

• A drastic overhaul of the tax system.

The first step is relatively simple. Businesses will go bankrupt with the end of corporate subsidies but the employees will have UBI. Tax credits will no longer be an option to try to get votes (see below) but they will no longer be an option to incentivize better behaviour on the part of consumers, which is a problem.

The tax overhaul is more complicated. I propose a number of major changes to Canada’s tax system.

Land Value Taxation

Income inequality is caused as much by (land) rent as it is caused by capital gains and excessive C-suite salaries. Arguably, it’s actually rental income that is the biggest driver of income inequality.

Economists from across the political spectrum have long viewed rental income as taxable because, at bottom, it is unproductive income.

A land value tax is not a property tax (and property taxes would need to be ended or drastically reduced) – it is tax on unimproved land. Basically it is a tax on the location and perceived value of the land, i.e. the value of the land at Yonge & Bloor in 2025 is much, much, much higher than the value of the land of land in Fort Severn, Ontario so the owners of land at Yonge & Bloor will pay much higher taxes. If climate change causes currently empty land that is higher up and farther from the sea than Fort Severn to become extremely in-demand, the LVT would change to reflect that. (Land that belongs to the government would be exempt, obviously.)

Taxing rent can be a bit complicated because it’s hard to figure out how much the land is worth without the property on it. (There are many other issues.) The quick solution is to tax land at something like 85%-95% of its estimated value to allow for a mistake. The value of the land must be reevaluated every year, much like your property taxes are currently.

Another complication is what to do with private land that preserves natural or cultural heritage. There would have to be some administration here which is not great, as it costs money, and there would need to be some kind of formula such as limiting the number of “improvements” to any private land exempted for the purpose of preservation.

LVT will not only solve our housing crisis it will destroy the housing market in our biggest cities. It will force Canadians who have used houses as investment vehicles to invest directly in the economy instead. UBI needs to be introduced before LVT so people have something to fall back on. It will undoubtedly make a lot of people very mad which is why my party and I would also be running on not running for election a second time. (Whether or not this would be public information is another story.) To deter the next government from repealing LVT and to prevent undue financial burdens for existing home owners income tax will be abolished for the vast majority of Canadians (see below). If everyone still hates LVT by the time they vote in a new government that government will also have to reintroduce an income tax in addition to removing LVT, which should make it pretty unpalatable.

There are too many people on the planet and those who have way more land than others usually have it because they lucked into inheriting it because of some past injustice. And many of them get and stay rich off of that luck. That doesn’t make any sense. This is the best way I know of to fix this problem. And LVT will go a long way to paying for UBI.

(My party would be known as “LVT for UBI” or something super catchy like that.)

Resource Severance Taxation

National resources are a common good that are harvested usually with little benefit to the surrounding community, beyond jobs. At one point they were held in common and then a corporation comes along and does some work (mining, logging, um bottling water) and then sells them as if they always belonged to the corporation. Corporations and individuals would pay a tax on any natural resource that they extract, be it minerals, water or, if they are old enough, plants. (It would be relatively simple, for example, to have a resource severance tax on old growth or second growth forests that didn’t apply to someone operating a tree farm.)

Nearly Ending Income Taxation

It has long been assumed that progressive income taxation is a necessary requirement of any society that aspires to any degree of fairness. But tax credits - candy dangled to voters by politicians - make the system more expensive by increasing administration. Just as bad, income tax codes regularly go from being really simple to extremely complicated in a generation. (The smartest countries redo their tax codes periodically to temporarily fix this problem.)

I propose nearly entirely ending income tax, with LVT, severance taxes, VAT and externality taxes making up the difference. Initially I thought about completely ending income tax but I do think there are salaries that warrant some taxation because of how hilariously extreme they are. (If you want to pay your c-suite extra, pay them in stock.) I would end the capital gains tax as well for the obvious reason that investments in the Canadian economy are a net good.

So any remaining income tax would be at something like X times the average annual income for a person and X times the annual revenues for a corporation (if we should even have corporate income tax), where X is a large multiple of the average income (or profits, for corporations). If you make under that, you don’t pay income tax. Above the multiple, however, the tax would get progressively more onerous immediately: so if Y times the annual income would have a significantly higher rate, with Y equaling X times the annual income + 1/X or something like that. The higher the salary the more the tax but you have to make a shitload of money to get taxed this way. Again, if a company wants to reward an employee an exorbitant amount, they can do it with stock.

Progressive and Dynamic Value Added Tax (VAT)

I wrote about dynamic VATs originally on my Substack and it’s paywalled now. If you want access for free, let me know in the comments. Anyway…

Canada’s HST (and various PSTs) is flat, though it depends on which province you’re in and this strikes me as just as dumb as a flat income tax. We can make our VAT both progressive and dynamic.

The progressive part is simple: we establish categories for types of goods and services based on how necessary they are to live. The most necessary have the lowest rates (food) and the least necessary have the highest rates (yachts, “consultants”). This is basically a combination VAT and luxury tax. Within in these categories are different rates as well. So if you go to the Beer Store and buy the worst macro lager you can find, you pay less VAT than me if I go to a microbrewery and buy their imperial stout. The tax is higher for products that are higher than the average cost of the product.

The dynamic part I am very fond of but I think it would be way less popular: if every store/service provider in Canada published their prices to the blockchain monthly, weekly, daily or hourly, we could adjust the VAT all the time because almost all cash registers are connected to the internet now. This way the VAT would reflect the market and your VAT actually decrease at times. But I do think most people would find this system extremely upsetting and would get mad about it whether or not it saved them money. People just hate uncertainty with so much passion that I think whoever introduced this (me) would get thrown out of office.

Externality Taxation

I am thinking here of taxing negative externalities but we could also conceivably give tax credits for positive externalities.

The most obvious negative externality is pollution and I would tax pollution based on the accepted science of the time. This science would have to be routinely vetted (hopefully by an external body – run by, say, all the universities in Canada) and so what would be taxed would depend upon the year. This would primarily apply to corporations but, of course, if some random dude dumped a bunch of waste in a pond, he could also be subject to the tax.

I have been musing about a similar externality tax for social harms but I worry that this would be too hard to determine and enforce. I had at least two ideas in mind about what I think are pretty obvious socially harmful practices by corporations:

• Extremely high turnover: if a corporation is constantly firing its staff (or the staff quit constantly) above a certain rate (say a number of times the percent national average) then the corporation pays a tax

• MLM/other borderline fraud industries that aren’t already outlawed pay additional taxes because of their business models.

I know this is wishy washy. Let’s drop it and just focus on taxing specific negative externalities that are easy to quantify.

Wealth Taxation

I used to be a fan of wealth taxation but I do think it’s awfully hard to administer. It’s based on somebody’s subjective assessment of someone else’s wealth which, in turn, is based on the vagaries of the stock market. Seems arbitrary!

So instead I prefer my idea above of incorporating luxury taxes into the VAT system. If the rich really do want to buy insanely expensive things then they will be taxed as insane rates. If they want to import those things into Canada, similar rates would apply.

LVT should hit the rich pretty damn hard because so many of them have their money in real estate and it is much more efficient tax and one that is much easier to apply somewhat fairly.

I proposed a rather extreme inheritance tax once which would be another way of having a wealth-adjacent tax. This would be a tax I would only consider as prime minister if all my other taxes above failed to pay for UBI and other government expenses. I do think it is likely to make society much more fair if it was complied with but I suspect it would not be complied with. Some kind of minimal estate tax, above a certain threshold, is likely necessary so I think following the rule for income tax above is probably a much more politically palatable option, where only estates above X times the average Canadian estate size pay taxes.

Status Rewards to Our Biggest Taxpayers

I wrote about status rewards for the biggest taxpayers a while ago. We should destigmatize paying taxes and celebrate those who pay the most. This may not actually reduce tax avoidance but it’s a start.

A Taxation Crown Corporation

The Bank of Canada sets our interest rates. A similar institution should set our tax rates and change them when needed.

I would set up this institution with a chairman that has a term for, say, 10 years, or 5 years but offset from the election cycle. This person would not be able to be replaced without doing something illegal.

That would mean that a) politicians would not control tax revenue and b) politicians could no longer run on cutting taxes meaning they would have to run on policies other than cutting taxes. Imagine that.

(I stole this idea from Garett Jones. One problem with this idea is it might increase public borrowing which would not be great.)

Other Policies

My primary goal as Prime Minister would be to revolutionize the welfare state and how we are taxed. However, if I somehow had the time, I have other ideas:

Free Adult Education

In addition to child education we should offer more free adult education – funding to provinces to provide such – in areas what are socially beneficial such as

• critical thinking (including how to argue)

• basic science literacy

• cognitive biases

• basics of advertising/marketing (including how to know you’re being sold something that probably isn’t very good)

• basic probability.

This would be separate from the university system. There would be no degrees. The whole point would be to just improve the citizenry and how they think about politics, economics, etc.

Decriminalization of Drug Use

Drug use is not a crime issue, it’s a public health issue. It should be treated as such. Nobody should go to jail for possession of any substance for personal use.

Now, that being said, humans have created some really terrible substances that addict us in ways that are really mendacious. The unregulated manufacture of those substances is a problem as is the unregulated distribution of of those substances. This is a good example of negative externality that should be taxed – manufacturing or importing substances that are so addictive that they literally destroy lives should be heavily taxed.

Anyway, it’s pretty clear the drug problem cannot be solved by just trying to eliminate supply. But a public health approach to the demand-side of the problem is necessary before any successful steps can be taken on the supply-side.

Legalization of Prostitution

It’s the oldest profession for a reason. Criminalizing prostitution is dumb on many levels, and is just a moral crusade pretending to be something more.

Prostitutes should not go to jail. Moreover, they should have the same kinds of labour protections as other professionals.

Johns should not go to jail either, unless they commit actual crimes.

The only people who should go to jail are the pimps.

National Detective School

This would be mandatory for the RCMP with incentives to regional and municipal police departments for attendance and certification. This school would teach:

• forensic science

• logic

• probability

• cognitive biases.

In addition, I would like to create a system which all police departments sign up for (as part of the detective school program) where other departments are randomly assigned to audit the work of any other department, say every five years.

So, for example, at some point in a given five year span, some department from somewhere else in the country would come in to TPS and look at a few cases and then file a report with the detective school (or some other body) as to whether that case meets their standards.

I believe this would substantially improve the crime solving part of policing. to me, that is the first step in police reform.

Mandatory Town Halls

To me, perhaps the biggest problem with the way media covers government is access journalism – journalists and columnists pull their punches with certain public figures to maintain their access. I think there is a very simple solution to this:

Once a month, a Minister from the federal government would be required to have an in-person or digital town hall with at least one citizen from each province and territory. These people would be chosen randomly, by lot. It would be like jury duty. At least one of these town halls must feature the Prime Minister and no one Minister could repeat within, say, 6 months.

Individual citizens could choose to opt out by giving away their seat however whoever they are giving their seat to could not be someone who had been to a town hall within the previous year. (This is to deter organizations from purchasing seats from citizens.)

This will obviously lead to some really strange and really bad questions from uninformed citizens but it will also lead to real questions, questions that should be asked by media members but which are not because either they want to maintain their access or the PM/Minister is deliberately ignoring them in a press conference or scrum. It would also be extremely hard for the government to stage-manage.

The same process could be implemented at the provincial and municipal levels.

I just discovered a better, more permanent idea called “Government Watch.” I would implement this idea instead, I think. We could do both.

Federal Incentives to Improve Education

The federal government should financially incentivize the provinces to improve childhood education. For example, if a province doesn’t want to teach contemporary Sex Ed, they don’t get this money.

Utilitarian Approach to White Collar Crime

I am not a utilitarian and I have huge issues with utilitarianism. But it’s time to treat white collar crime in a utilitarian manner.

White collar crime has a way bigger societal cost than “regular” crime.

But, as a society, we are way more mad about some murder or assault than we get about some company stealing millions.

We need to change this by building a progressive punishment system into the law, where the greater the (proven) effects of the crime, the greater the punishment and/or restitution.

That is, pension robbers need to be punished more harshly than burglars.

And they need to be registered like sex offenders.

Progressive Sentencing

Let’s categorize crimes into a few types based on harm:

• Crimes that cause physical harm

• Crimes that cause “psychic” harm (stalking, harassment, etc.)

• Property crimes

• All other crimes.

Anyone who is convicted of a first offense in the three non-physical harm categories should get limited punishment and mostly rehabilitation services, unless of offense effects a lot of people (as with the white collar crime approach above). The punishment is more severe for offenses involving physical harm but the focus should still be on rehabilitation.

For second-time offenses, the focus is more on punishment than rehab though rehab would be a possibility if there was good behaviour. Longer sentences are mandatory.

And then the length of punishment would increase by statute for third time and fourth time offenders and so on. This isn’t three strikes you’re out but rather 2 strikes you’re in a lot longer, 3 strikes you’re really in and 4 strikes you might not be coming back depending on the severity of the crime. As with the taxes above, it depends on the category of the crime but also the type within the category. Someone who is convicted of shoplifting five times is very different from someone who has committed two murders and should be punished accordingly.

The point is that recidivism is the biggest problem the criminal justice system has – most crime is committed by those who offend more than once and so those who offend more than once need to be in jail (or a similar facility) longer. The sentence range should always move with the number of offences.

Vickrey auctions for bidding on government projects

A Vickrey auction is when a bunch of buyers bid secretly, highest bid wins but the highest bidder pays the second highest price. So really these would be reverse Vickrey auctions since it’s one buyer and many sellers. Either way: in the interest of reducing government expenditures, I’d implement these auctions for the federal government, so bids more closely reflect true prices. A huge part of government spending is lost to paying too much for services for a variety of reasons.

Statutory Holiday Reform

Working Canadians should get a minimum of 13 workdays off per calendar year. Using the traditional British and Christian holidays as our rough guide, they would be:

1. New Year’s Day

2. Family Day

3. Good Friday

4. Easter Monday

5. Victoria Day

6. June Beer Company Holiday

7. Canada Day

8. August Civic Holiday (Simcoe Day where I live)

9. Labour Day

10. Thanksgiving

11. Remembrance Day

12. Christmas Day

13. Boxing Day

These would be national, rather than some provinces having them and some not.

I propose two additional modifications:

First, Quebec and the territories can pick a different set of 13 days due to cultural distinctions. (And if New Brunswick wants that too, I see no reason to say no.)

Second, and far more importantly in my opinion, members of other major religions in Canada can choose a different set of 13 days to take off by signing an agreement with their employer. Canadian businesses can then choose to be open every day of the year if they see fit.

Amending the Constitution of Canada

If I was somehow able to accomplish the above it would then be time to change the Constitution. There are two parts to this reform:

Geographical Reforms

There are two geographical reforms I’d like to make:

• Make Canada’s largest urban areas their own provinces

• Split Canada’s largest provinces in two.

First, I’d like to make Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver their own provinces. Specifically, I’d like to make the urban areas their own provinces. Where to draw the boundaries gets dicey but the extent of constant urbanization could be a useful guide (but only for the present, which is a problem). These cities should no longer be subservient to governments in other cities and/or which have other priorities. So that would bring us to 13 provinces and 3 territories.

Second but, to me, more importantly, we’d split Ontario and Quebec in two. The northern parts of both provinces are economically and culturally distinct from the heavily populated souths. They have tiny political representation in Toronto and Quebec and they never get anything because they are dominated politically and economically. They should be separate provinces.

I don’t like talking strategy but I know that the Quebec proposals won’t fly so the changes to Toronto, Vancouver and northern Ontario would be packaged with the below reforms while a separate package would target Quebec (and wouldn’t get anywhere).

Political Reforms:

I want to get rid of the monarchy but I understand this is probably a non-starter. So, instead:

• elect the Governor General as, essentially, a very weak President

• elect the Senate: 1 Senator per 13 16 18 provinces and territories and then additional Senators based on population

Our ballots would be ranked so that you rank each candidate by order of preference.

I know everyone wants proportional representation but I do want some regional representation so it couldn’t be a strictly proportional system. Your MP needs to live near enough to you to have at least some idea of what your problems are.

(I have long been a proponent of a particular counting system here but I have recently been convinced that Borda count is probably the best way to go if you care about such things.)

Lastly, I want include a “nepo” provision for running for political office. If your father, mother, aunt or uncle by blood or adoption, or step-father or step-mother by marriage, or father-in-law or mother-in-law by marriage was an MP or Senator, you cannot run for Parliament or Senate. And I would strongly encourage the provinces to pass the same rules for themselves and their municipalities.

Other stuff:

Here are some stray thoughts including a couple “As Dictator” promises.

The Environment

Ending tax credits and subsidies would make it hard for the government to guide the adoption of green technology though hopefully externality taxes would help corporations go green much more quickly.

The biggest idea I have here is to combat climate change by dramatically expanding public transit in Canada. However, electric vehicle technology is getting so much better that it’s possible this idea might not make sense sooner rather than later.

As Prime Minister, I would invest in modernizing the grid to better handle the coming solar and wind power surpluses and possibly also just build a bunch of solar and wind generation in parts of the country that are too remote for private companies to bother. (Just like with what we did with that network of dishes from the Part of Our Heritage.)

Celebrity Political Endorsements Must Be Qualified

Okay, I understand I couldn’t actually do this, so call it an “As Dictator” promise instead:

If a celebrity wants to wade into politics and endorse a politician during official campaign season, whether in an interview or in a paid advertisement, the celebrity must answer a quiz on the issues of the campaign. And this quiz should be published with the endorsement, i.e. next to the endorsement if it’s print/text and put in front of the audio or visual interview/endorsement.

Unfortunately, we citizens are stupid, and we need to be told that our celebrities do not know anything when it comes to public policy. (I’m looking at your Wayne Gretzky.)

Tweets Cannot be Reported As News

Okay, one other “As Dictator…” policy: social media posts are not news and cannot be reported as such. News organizations running stories based solely on social media content alone will be fined with those fines going to a fund which supports the aforementioned Adult Education programs.

Enough of my silly ideas. If you are seriously interested in political reform in Canada you should watch Unriggged, which you can do for free.